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“We have a lot of statistics, but we still don’t really understand why the achievement gap continues to widen for English-language learners after the fourth grade,” says Nonie Lesaux, assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Alan Bersin, the outgoing superintendent of public education of San Diego City Schools (SDCS) and a member of the HGSE Visiting Committee, agrees. In fact, after hearing Lesaux present her research on bilingualism and literacy achievement in the spring of 2004, he asked her to participate in a review of his school district to assess how SDCS’s reform strategy was affecting English- language learners—who comprise almost one third of his district—and to measure the success of his focus on increasing teacher capacity to address the needs of learners.
The growing number of English-language learners in the nation’s schools has been the subject of much debate relating to public policy, models of instruction, and overall student achievement. SDCS has developed Balanced Literacy, a unique literacy program well suited for English-language learners that focuses on engaging literacy instruction, as opposed to scripted instruction, the more traditional model used in most districts. While there is still work to be done, one of the driving forces behind the early success of Balanced Literacy is the strong professional development model that allows the district’s central office to send resource staff to work directly with teachers. The research commissioned by Bersin is featured in Urban Reform Lessons from San Diego, a recent compilation of pieces on SDCS edited by Frederick Hess, Ed.M.’90. In addition, to build upon her work for Bersin and to focus on what she sees as the real issue—working a second language into the curriculum so it’s considered an asset for reading—Lesaux was awarded a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to study native-Spanish-speaking fourth-graders in SDCS. For reasons that researchers are still exploring, English language students’ gains are impressive at the elementary-school level, but there has been alarmingly little progress at the middle and high-school levels. This is an important age bracket to target because if a student fails to attain fluency in English by the time she reaches high school, she is particularly vulnerable to overall school failure, or dropping out of school entirely. Lesaux contends that “the first step in good instruction research is to back up and say,‘What’s really happening?’” She and a team of doctoral students work with three schools in SDCS, using both standardized and researcher developed tasks to thoroughly examine the relationship between Spanish and English literacy skills. For example, if English reading comprehension is the “gold standard,” what skills in Spanish are lending themselves to this standard? And, what skills in English are lending themselves to this comprehension? So far, there has been little to no measurement of this process, something Lesaux is trying to change. The next step is to identify the skills that don’t transfer from one language to the other, then to determine how to best teach those skills. While results are forthcoming, early feedback from participants demonstrates that teachers are “starved” for the sort of research that Lesaux and her doctoral students are conducting.
SDCS is not alone in its need to better understand how to meet the needs of English-language learners. The ultimate goal is to find a formula of instruction that will work for every urban district in the United States. While no two districts are alike, the general consensus is that if researchers can identify the best methods for teaching and testing those models at the district, school, and teacher levels, the result will be modes of instruction usable by many districts. For many, this is a particularly exciting idea in relation to a problem like literacy among English-language learners, which has typically been the focus of heated policy debates far removed from the school district or classroom. “By and large, a second language should be an asset, not an obstacle to overcome,” says Lesaux. “It’s a matter of figuring out how it fits into curriculum as an asset. The shift from policy, to an actual scenario of research, to practice is how we can best help districts and, in turn, these learners.” About the Article
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HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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